ZBrushCentral

Best way to go about Quadrangulating Mesh?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

So i have another question i oculd not find an answer for and i have tried everything i could think of

I have a weapon model i made in Softimage and it is optimized for a game engine. When i import it into ZBrush to go in and create the details, i subdivide it up to around 3mil polys just like i would for a character mesh but since the mesh is a weapon mesh it is not a grid of evenly spaced lines, instead it has different sized/shaped faces in certain parts which causes any details that are painted onto it or sculpted to have lower fidelity compared to more densely compacted areas.

What would be the best way to go about turning the mesh into an evenly dense grid like mesh without deleting the UV maps?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance

Here are some pictures of what i’m talking about:

Attachments

sculpt-1.jpg

sculpt-2.jpg

sculpt-3.jpg

sculpt-4.jpg

#2

If you absolutely need to preserve the UV maps, it might be better to use Softimage to quadrangulate it. Then that mesh can be imported into zbrush and any existing sculpted detail can be projected onto it.

But if you’re using a baking-based workflow (Ultimapper, xnormal, etc) the UVs of the highpoly mesh wont be important. I’d just dynamesh the model in that case.

#3

Yeah, i have quadrandulated the mesh in Softimage as well but it still doesn’t make the evenly spaced grid like Dynamesh does, all it does is turn Tris into Quads.

The problem i have is that i usually manually UV map the mesh in Softimage since ultimapper doesn’t really give the most optimal packing so if i dynamesh the model and i already have the low poly model UVed i have no way of lining up the details of the high poly model with the UVs of the low poly model unless i am missing something?

#4

If your lowpoly mesh is already unwrapped, and your highpoly doesn’t change your major/medium forms you can sculpt however you see fit (dynamesh, etc) and then just bake your highpoly details to your lowpoly mesh.

You could also un-triangulate your mesh. Remove those edges and then add your extra edge loops to give you evenly spaced quads so you can sculpt.

#5

Well now i feel stupid, i was always under the impression that the high poly mesh had to have the same UVs as the low poly mesh in order to bake the normals over… Thanks for clarifying this for me, i just tried it ad it worked.

Now i have another question though, how can i do the same for PolyPaint data since it does require the same UVs between high and low poly meshes?

#6

your high and lowpoly don’t require the same UVs. You can transfer color information from one UV set to another in the same manner as highpoly details. xNormal will read vertex color information as well so you don’t even need to unwrap your highpoly mesh if you don’t want to.

#7

I have tried using xNormal to bake diffuse in the past but it never gives me the greatest results like it does with NormalMaps and AO.

I will keep messing with it to see if i can get it working properly, this would save me a LOT of time, thanks for all of the info.

#8

From my experience, Xnormal does a much better job at transfering vertex colors on its own than it does the older method (which involves giving the highpoly mesh a temporary set of UVs, using zbrush to convert polypaint to a temporary texture for it, and then using xnormal/ultimapper to transfer that over to the lowpoly).